AHRQ https://www.ahrq.gov has awarded MedStar Health https://www.medstarhealth.org another grant for nearly a $2 million to enable AHRQ to expand their research collaboration with Stanford Medicine and Intermountain Healthcare in order to focus on telehealth access, safety, and equity.
The funding will enable researchers to establish a patient safety learning laboratory over a four year funding period to apply a cross disciplinary, human factors, and systems engineering approach to connected care enhancements, especially among patients with chronic conditions and other vulnerable populations.
Through the new grant funding, the team will continue work under the name “Connected CARE-Care Access Research, Equity & Safety Consortium” to expand their initial focus on primary care.
They will study the care continuum tied to outpatient settings more holistically with special attention to chronic care and health equity. The team will also collaborate with experts at Microsoft Research and Bluestream Health, and with health equity patient and family advisors.
The Co-Principal investigators have identified four areas of possible impact to explore:
- Proactive opportunities to advance safety and health through telehealth to include enhancing existing information transfer between standalone telehealth organizations and emergency departments. They will also consider how to proactively use telehealth to improve safety
- Process optimization remains as essential to safety as technology enhancements. The ability to communicate about and deliver on specialty care referrals following on-demand or scheduled telehealth visits is critical to care and benefits from human factors and systems engineering approach
- Personalization of telehealth technology use serves as key to both safety and health equity. Past research shows that the ability to safely deliver care via phone, video, and other unique telehealth technologies like chatbots is vital to serving vulnerable patients, people with disabilities, patients with diverse language needs, people with chronic conditions, and those who may need to use telehealth to evaluate if symptoms requiring care can wait
- Provider wellbeing is an urgent priority for patient safety as care becomes more connected. Providers are reporting that patients’ use of portal messages for clinical questions has increased exponentially.